Officer can level up with the player opening new possibilities and options

Officer will be wounded when your ship is lost - implemented as lives

Officer does not lose lives when you surrender in battle

Total number of lives = 10 and if you lose all of them you will have to hire a new officer

Starting set of perk is limited - a lot of things had to be reworked to support them. The set of perks will be drastically increased in the next patches adding open world perks, crafting perks and trading perks and of course more battle related perks. The main goal of officer perks is to provide unique and exciting bonuses without any useless options (so called filler).

A lot of perks were proposed by players and as promised - captains whose ideas will get into the game eventually will receive rare ships as rewards.

Starting perk set

Double charge – officer knows how to efficiently use double charge powder allowing using this option in battle

Double shot – Officer knows how to efficiently use double shotted guns (cannot be used on carronades)

Determined defender – Officer knows how to prepare the organized defence on boarding. Your ship can only be boarded if the attacker has 40% higher crew. It also gives you the option to use the defend command for free (during boarding)

Thrifty – Repair kit is not consumed if you use them in battle

Prepared – Ship starts with loaded cannons

Pirate Hunter – Officer hates pirates and is able to motivate his crew better, allowing faster reload if the enemy ship has a pirate flag. Reload bonus is 20%. In the future this perk will only be available to nationals

Pirate – officer with the shady piracy past, allows to extract more sailing performance increasing battle speed by 1 knot if the enemy has a national ship on their side. In the future this perk will only be available to Pirates.

Crew is no longer a free element and does not have auto-recovery from the air.

Crew needs to be hired and recovered after losses

Crew is lost on any ship loss

Crew is not lost if you surrender in battle

Every rank has its limit of free crew provided by the admiralty. For example a first ranked newbie has 40 free crew, so he does not have to pay for crew if he loses the ship. At higher levels the free limit will be enough to jump into a basic frigate. Lineships will be more expensive to maintain.

Crew can be recovered by medkits in the open sea after battle

In the future doctor can be added to recover parts of casualties slowly in battle.

Basic medkits will be available in all ports, more advanced options have to be crafted by players.

One of the purposes of the crew is to provide more options in fleet managements as fleets are back. This is a third attempt to bring player fleets back.

Player can add any ship to their fleet provided he has enough crew to man those vessels.

Fleets can now be repaired at sea by using consumable repair kits

Other changes

Npc Capture is back - players can capture ships from NPCs up to 4th rank. Captured ships will have to have crew assigned to them and they can be given a command to escape battle if you want to save that ship even if you have enemies present.

New buildings added - Tobacco Plantation, Sugar Plantation, Farm

New resources added - tobacco, sugar, salt

New materials added - fish meat, food supplies

New consumables added for crafting repair kits, medkits

Chat security improved (problem was identified by the player qw569)

Land added to minimap

Coordinate grid has been added to open world map

Home is disabled in Open world

New sounds added

Fixed bugs:

Shadows bugs fixed

Crew casualties caused by grapeshot were not counted - fixed

Certain bugs with the single tracking shot from lower decks fixed

Fixed bugs with boarding crew focus visualization after boarding

Fixed bug of player teleport after port re-entry

Fixed bug that was not dropping full loot on ship capture

Fixed certain sound bugs

Tunings:

Number of regional centers increased to allow more ship of the line port battles for several nations (list here)

Flag purchase cooldown increased to 2 days (48 hours). Initially we wanted to make it 7 days but based on player feedback it could create problems for several nations. Port battle rework is now set as high priority and they will be changed drastically by August.

Battle relog after disconnect time increased to 40 mins to allow player to return to battle during longer time if internet went nuts.

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I think the officer Bonus is a bit too overpowered. We are trimming our Ships like crazy just to get it 0.25 Knots faster and +1Knots is just too much. Also the Defender bonus is bit too strong too. The Officers should give you slight advantages but not make it too unbalanced

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I think the officer Bonus is a bit too overpowered. We are trimming our Ships like crazy just to get it 0.25 Knots faster and +1Knots is just too much. Also the Defender bonus is bit too strong too. The Officers should give you slight advantages but not make it too unbalanced

20% reload bonus against pirates sounds pretty much over the top as well. It renders pirates kinda unable to play 1v1 or any kind of even-numbered fights, if the players know what they are doing. Basically promoting the ganking instead of real fighting

I really like the idea of officers, but i think the perks all need a lot of tweaking

oh one more: please do not remove the ability to send ships to outposts. or replace the current system with a different one. Not being able to conveniently bring ships to far away outposts without spending hours sailing there will seriously hurt the game.

Edited June 29, 2016 by Sharden

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By that, do you mean only 1 officier per ship (since we could see 3 officers slots per vessel) but you can have 24 officers if you have 24 ships. Or only 1 officer that you'll have to switch from one ship to another ?